Surprise surprise!

I forgot to switch my mobile on yesterday – either that or it went off because the battery got too low. Anyway, when I switched it on this morning I found that I’d got about six voice-mails… from the wood man. It seemed that whereas I was expecting him sometime on Saturday, he wanted to deliver straight away! I spoke to him eventually at 10.30 am and suggested he might like to come in a couple of hours time, to give me time to get to the bank, but I forgot that that would have collided violently with his lunch-time! He wanted to come at 11.30, so that didn’t leave me much time to dash up to the cash machine at Rouffignac. If anyone wants proof that when you start to impose unreasonable levels of tax on people you actually raise less tax, they only need to look at France. All of the small tradesmen now insist on being paid in cash, for obvious reasons, and who can blame them 😉

I explained to the wood man how to find my house and he came trundling into my drive-in with his tractor and trailer at about 11.20. I showed him where I’d like it dropped and he was really helpful, reversing his trailer right next to the spot I’d chosen. We set to together and had the 3 stères neatly stacked up in about 10 minutes or so.

After a short conversation and my paying him, I then had to cover the stack up because we were expecting rain later, possibly early evening or in the early hours of the morning and it would have been daft to get the nice, dry wood wet unnecessarily. Luckily, I just had enough of the thick, black impervious plastic that I made 56NE’s covers from left over to do the job.

So this afternoon I was able to make a start on the new wood store base. The first job is to get the ground levelled off and prepared, which meant taking a pick-axe to it. While I was doing it, the humidity level was chronic and although I wasn’t exerting myself that much, I was wringing wet. In fact, we even had a ‘phantom’ shower from nowhere later on in the afternoon and eventually it began to rain quite hard for a while, causing me to stop work. Lucky that I got the wood covered, eh? Here’s what I got done today – not that much, but it’s a start.

I’ve got to make the base a bit high in the front because eventually there’ll be a path there and I can’t afford the floor of the store to be lower otherwise I’ll have water running in. And I don’t want any nasty surprises like that, that’s for sure 😕